Learn about key BigCommerce features and how they can help your business reach its revenue and performance goals. From customization to third-party integrations, BigCommerce offers a range of functionality to help your company succeed.

4 BigCommerce Features to Increase Website Performance

Whether you're evaluating platform options or looking to improve on your existing eCommerce technology stack, BigCommerce offers many benefits. In this post you'll learn about four key BigCommerce features and how they can help your business achieve its goals.

Top BigCommerce Features

Website Customization

SEO Optimization

Payment & Inventory Management

Applications Integrations

Basics of SaaS eCommerce Platforms

SaaS providers host and deliver technology solutions. Additionally, SaaS platforms easily integrate with external ERP or CRM systems and take less time to develop, customize and deploy. As a SaaS platform, BigCommerce maintains servers and database storage, runs security patches and upgrades and responds to issues. This ultimately removes the burden from businesses so they can focus on goals that move their businesses forward.

If you’re still comparing SaaS vs on-premise, we highly recommend checking out our BigCommerce vs Magento guide. You’ll see a comprehensive overview of the differences between the platforms and get more information about what makes each unique.

BigCommerce Benefits

We outline the benefits of BigCommerce in our related blog here, but to briefly summarize and review:

Hosting is baked into a business subscription, which removes hardware costs and separate hosting fees. BigCommerce’s often-touted 99.9% uptime removes concern over lost sales due to server-side technical difficulties.

Implementation of a site build is normally completed in 2-4 months. This is almost half of the time needed for many on-premise eCommerce implementations.

BigCommerce requires fewer in-house resources to operate and maintain the site. BigCommerce includes upgrades and updates in the monthly subscription cost, ultimately help businesses to eliminate technical debt and reduce cost. With the potential cost-of-ownership savings, SaaS merchants are often able to increase their bottom line or reinvest in things like marketing.

BigCommerce Features

Website Customization

BigCommerce is a highly customizable platform. The BigCommerce Stencil upgrade framework allows customers to enhance fast-loading templates to their specific business needs. These pre-built responsive templates help you easily and quickly build an online store that resonates with your customers and showcases your products. Stencil also allows developers to customize shopping cart templates for added control.

Additionally, BigCommerce includes its Akamai Image Manager within its themes no extra cost to you. The image manager automatically optimizes each image for browsers and devices to ensure beautiful display and fast load times. BigCommerce also lets you test the website before publishing to ensure everything is just how you want it.

SEO & Analytics Optimization

BigCommerce includes built-in SEO features to help businesses increase organic exposure. Its analytics dashboard offers customer insights and visibility into page and product level performance. BigCommerce recognizes the analytics suites as a key differentiator and as such, their in-house team continues to invest in improving the dashboard.

Payment & Inventory Management

BigCommerce supports a variety of third-party payment services. Specifically, they accept payments from major providers including PayPal, Stripe, Apple Pay, Pay with Amazon and more. This feature allows businesses to make the decision of which service is a right fit for them based on features that align to their target users.

BigCommerce will not penalize companies that use non-standard payment gateways and also helps you manage inventory and orders from a single location. You can also use third-party fulfillment applications to scale your business as you grow.

Application Integrations

BigCommerce integrates with external applications and maintains a marketplace of tested and approved third-party apps. The active app developer community and a well-stocked app marketplace helps businesses find custom elements or desired features that can improve their sites.

As an Elite BigCommerce Partner Agency, our team has developed two BigCommerce apps to expand what’s possible with the platform.

HubShop.ly integrates HubSpot CRM functionality with BigCommerce stores This allows merchants to recapture lost revenue associated with abandoned carts, segment their customer population and automate emails and workflows by marrying HubSpot with BigCommerce data.

Our BigPr.es app allows users to connect their WordPress sites with their BigCommerce stores, enabling them to post dynamic product modules (populated by BigCommerce data) within relevant content on their Wordpress site.

Who is Not a Good Fit for BigCommerce?

BigCommerce may not be a match for your site if your business requires a heavily customized order flow, checkout process or access to stored credit card data. For more complex business needs like these, the potential cost savings could be diminished as BigCommerce may not yet have existing functionality to exactly match your requirements. If you're interested in exploring more SaaS options, we recommend exploring our blog about Magento competitors.

Conclusion

BigCommerce embodies a lot of what’s right with SaaS eCommerce platforms. By enabling third-party development and including more features and functionality off the shelf, BigCommerce offers a turnkey solution that’s more open to customization.

We hope this blog was a helpful jumping-off point for your platform exploration. Please feel free to reach out through the form below if you have any questions or would like to chat more about your specific business needs.